HERAT: They are tiny, silent killers, dropped from the bellies of the American bombs that pulverised the Taliban defences, and striking long after the air war on Afghanistan has ended. At least 41 people have been killed and 46 injured here and nearby villages by cluster bombs which did not immediately explode when they were unleashed by the US bombers, but nestled in the soil and bided their time.

The cheerful yellow-coloured devices - called bomblets - parachuted to earth from the mother bomb 202 at a time. They are a highly effective killer, deploying, in military parlance, three “kill mechanisms” to slice through the thick armour of tanks, and injure and burn humans.

In the area of Rabat village, the BLU-97 bomblets have killed 10 people since the bombing ostensibly ended there in early November.

Deminers coordinated by the UN and now working in the villages around Rabat say they have located and defused nearly 200 unexploded bomblets, embedded in the walls of the domed mud and chaff houses or from under the rose bushes in the gardens enclosed within every family’s compound.

But their work is painstakingly slow, and about a third of the fields remain off-limits to the farmers, said Mohammad Gul Siddiqi of the UN mine action centre. Once the Taliban was routed, the US provided the UN with data on the areas where cluster bombs had been deployed. According to the figures, 1,722 bomblets were dropped on a sole location here. However, the US drastically under-reported the extent of cluster bombing, deminers say, and in some instances identified locations that were 7km from the site of the actual bombing.

The unexploded cluster bombs have proved far deadlier than the tens of thousands of mines laid in Afghanistan by occupying Soviet forces. Demining experts expect a similar picture to Herat to emerge in other parts of the country that were subjected to cluster bombing.

The bomblets are exceedingly sensitive to heat and movement and can be detonated inadvertently by a radio signal within 25 metres, said Sean Moorhouse, a British-born deminer from the Swiss Federation for Mine Action. And the bomblets are a sophisticated killer: on explosion, they fragment into dozens of fiery metal fragments, slicing and burning into human flesh.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.